Authentic Thaumaturgy: Ponderations

 

I got this little gem on digital media, a bit unusual for me, but nonetheless one of my better PDF purchases. If you haven't had the pleasure of digesting this bit if gaming magic, I summarize. It is an attempt to put real world magic into game terms. Yep, you read that right. And I'm not talking about David Copperfield/Kris Angel Illusion magic. I'm talking about real life, shamanic, witchcraft, Voodoo, Solomonic Ceremonial summoning and binding magic. Magick with a K courtesy Aleister Crowley. 

And the author was no stranger to such esoteric subjects, nor gaming. Isaac Bonewits was a practising "magician" and a college educated scholar of magic. 

He knew of what he wrote. Bonewits' degree was from UC Berkley in, you guessed it, Magic Studies. Albeit a B.A.. he was still one of the first degree holding individuals to be able to claim he studied magic at university. The Book itself was based in solid scientific study of what forces may be behind magic. In short, parapsychology. And Isaac wrote a book that actually makes Authentic Thaumaturgy much more understandable. 

Real Magic was a layman's exposition of the psychic abilities that are likely related to many of the paranormal effects that some people claim are magic. By the way, such a study is not just a part of the wild and wooly 60's and 70's. 

No less a professional PhD that Dean Radin, lead scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences wrote a very similar book. Radin, a long time academic parapsychological researcher lays out in his Real Magic the hypotheses of psychic phenomena and how what most call "magic" can tap into them and allow "normal" muggles to harness what is a very "Real" magic.

And if you're the skeptical sort, just take some time with Radin. He has several well written books that cover the foundational scientific research behind these apparently magical laws. This phenomenon has been proved beyond any reasonable doubt and replicated countless times. In fact in a recent interview Radin pointed out that most parapsychologists today no longer perform replication studies to prove the phenomena, that has been done to death. What they are interested in now is how these abilities and "powers" can be pushed in the service of humanity.

It may sound all a little too X-Files for some, too Professor X to others. But I find it delightful that a book like Authentic Thaumaturgy sought to bring reality back into fantasy with what is, for all intents and purposes, real fantasy. It's not alone in this endeavor now. Some far stranger things have been done in this name. And I'm sure it is all enough to have given the Satanic Panickers of the past fits of possession. And I also am not surprised it was Steve Jackson games that published it. They were always pressing the boundaries of reality and fiction--as the FBI raid on their studios when they published the cyberpunk source material.

Any intersection of the real and the imagination fascinates me. For the two are not nearly as far apart as we might think.